Apple Notes Shortcuts

apple-notes-shortcuts.md

Readwise Sync

• Shortcuts for Readwise sync to Apple Notes
• Consists of (2) shortcuts - The API Request and the Response Processing (Both must be used)
• Based on the shortcuts mentioned in this Reddit Thread
  • Main change is accounting for 26 results per request. Added nextPageCursor loop to get all results.
• Shortcuts (Both Required):
  1. Readwise API Call
  2. Readwise Response Processing and Note Creation (Use one or the other)
  • Create Notes with Cover Images
  • Create Notes without Cover Images

Consolidate Apple Notes

• This will consolidate multiple Apple notes into a single note. By default it searches for all notes with the "consolidate" tag. Feel free to change it.
  • https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4ba142bae0554efba15f1cddcea45b6e

Book Notes to TheBrain App Import

• This will import Book Notes from Apple Notes into TheBrain App. It is very specific to my book notes format, so some tweaking will be required.
  • https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/aa3eafe3e55f48778a7a2020e365735b

Thanks @hstagner, this is literally a life-changer. I used to use Obsidian to sync my Readwise highlights, but as I started to simplify my tool stack, I ended up with Apple Notes, which does not have an official Readwise integration and was a pain to manually import notes from readwise 🫡

This is awesome! Been ping-ponging back and forth between Obsidian and Apple Notes and I think this an some other recent additions are making it so I can stay with Apple Notes for the foreseeable future. Thanks for doing this! Works great for me.

So happy to see it's helping folks!

Hey, i'm really interested in using this - i added the #consolidate tag to a number of quick notes i took, and ran the shortcut, but this message came up. Any idea what the issue is there?
thanks for your help.

@kittystandardtime I cannot reproduce the error. I have seen this message in other imported shortcuts. Can you completely close shortcuts, then open it again and try to run it? Make sure the notes are still intact and the #consolidate tag hasn’t been removed from the previous attempt.

Curious, that looks like MacOS. Do you have an iOS device you can try it on?

The same error occurred on both iPad and Mac.

For Readwise Sync, if I added an additional highlight then resynced, it would always double up the highlights (edit, as in it readded all of them not just the new one). So I updated my version of the shortcut to always delete then recreate the note. Annoying that it always asks permission, so I wouldn't have an automated set time for this to run, but as this shouldn't happen often I think its an ok workaround.

Played with attempting an "if this dictionary value doesn't exist in the note, then add then append to note" but couldn't get it working for whatever reason.

Just kidding, the deletion did cause an issue after all. Would randomly tell me that locked/shared notes can't be edited so not sure what I did wrong.

Fixed it at the very end of the step two (no image) shortcut:
1. filtered to find the Base note again
2. added: IF body of base note (from above step) does not contain the text we want to append (text var from end of original version), then append that text. Nothing in the otherwise, since we want it to do nothing in that case.

Tested the edits there and seems to work as expected while still adding all highlights in their entirety when creating a new note.

Thanks so much for this! Just decided to use Readwise but was disappointed that the readwise content wouldn't show up in Spotlight search. But now, it can! Best of all the worlds. Full use of readwise features while still retaining a copy of all of it in Apple Notes.